DMARC Hoping to Stop Phishing

Financial institutions and ISPs have been trying for decades to stop phishing and other techniques that compromise their customers' bank information. Despite big campaigns to educate customers not to access bank Websites via emails, and complex filtering systems to block suspicious messages, many people still get caught and give their login details to those thieves.

Banks have increased security measures, including one-time security codes and access cards with coordinates to stop hackers from initiating transactions on customer accounts. But phishing still goes on, costing financial institutions and their customers millions of dollars.

Now, an alliance between major leading financial institutions, such as Bank of America, PayPal, and Fidelity, and email providers AOL, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo will try to put an end to phishing by email. The new organization is called DMARC: Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance.

Its goal is to establish a standard-based framework for mail senders -- the good guys -- to use email authentication in their infrastructure. Basically, the email providers won't deliver a message that is supposed to be sent from one of the financial institutions unless it is authenticated within the provisions of the framework.
Today, email providers rely on databases and complex unreliable methods to discern legitimate messages from fake ones. DMARC framework will provide a simple solution to avoid filtering real emails from financial institutions while blocking other messages that don't have proper authentication.

At this point, the DMARC task team is gathering information from the field and will submit its specifications to the IETF for standardization.

"Email phishing defrauds millions of people and companies every year, resulting in a loss of consumer confidence in email and the Internet as a whole," said Brett McDowell, Chair of DMARC.org and Senior Manager of Customer Security Initiatives at PayPal. "Industry cooperation -- combined with technology and consumer education -- is crucial to fight phishing."

As stated in the organization's Website: "DMARC removes guesswork from the receiver's handling of these failed messages, limiting or eliminating the user's exposure to potentially fraudulent and harmful messages. DMARC also provides a way for the email receiver to report back to the sender about messages that pass and/or fail DMARC evaluation."

But hackers are not sleeping; as reported by the BBC, online criminals have found the way to circumvent the latest generation of security directly, without emails, when customers access their bank Websites.

In "Man in the Browser" attacks, the malware lives in the browser dormant until the user logs into a financial institution Website. It then gets between the user and the bank's Website and alters its contents, and the customer is unaware of anything being wrong.

So phishing can be stopped or reduced by initiatives such as DMARC, but security is always an issue when accessing financial institutions' Websites. It is important to watch for any suspicious changes in the Web and check directly by phone with the bank if something appears to be wrong.

I still think that educating the users and making sure they practice safe browsing is the most effective way to prevent these things from happening. In the case of man in the middle attacks, you can limit what the hackers gain by ensuring that customers/users are forced to use https and need to use virtual keypads to access their accounts. Still, it would be a cost-effective measure to make sure that everyone in the process, from the users to the implementors are properly educated on the security risks and how to prevent them.

@Pablo- Thanks. So, in a way, the solution to phishing and the solution to man in the middle are very different. Stopping man in the middle attacks seems to be mostly about finding ways to keep your customers more secure which is even harder than finding a way to make your own email more secure.

@Dave, the "man in the browser" attach is a kind of malware, but very still until triggered by accessing one the banking websites. Then it creates a fake page between your screen and the bank site and shows you the information of your account without any unusual activity.

Their idea is that you don't see anything unusal until you get an actual statement. That's why the technique is so dangerous since they can access your account for several days and transfer money without people realizing it.

Thanks, Pablo. This seems like a way to at least filter out some of the least sophisticated attacks. I would love to be able to trust email from my bank again. What does th eman in the middle technique rely on? Malware on the victim's computer?

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